Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper told a business group Thursday that it’s “crazy” to raise fees or taxes when revenues are down, or for Colorado to be known as an anti-business state.

At the same time, Hickenlooper, who is running for governor, said Gov. Bill Ritter’s administration sided with “overboard” environmentalists in crafting new oil and gas regulations.

The remarks to the South Metro Chamber of Commerce provided a clue about how a Hickenlooper administration might be different from Ritter’s, although both men are Democrats.

Hickenlooper was introduced by chamber president John Brackney as a “friend to the business community” who solves problems.

The business group was particularly concerned about the nine tax credits and exemptions that Democrats repealed this year to help balance the budget, and the perception that Colorado is no longer friendly to business.

Hickenlooper said that when Denver’s revenues plunged in 2008 and 2009 to the lowest levels since 1935, he was urged to start charging for trash collection.

The tax-credit questions were expected, but the oil-and-gas comments came at the end of his lengthy response to a question about why a such a pro-business person would be a Democrat.

Hickenlooper, a former geologist and restaurant owner, got into the race in January after Ritter unexpectedly dropped his re-election bid. Hickenlooper faces the winner of the GOP primary, either former U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis or businessman Dan Maes.

New oil and gas regulations took effect a year ago.

“The whole process, I thought, was flawed, and I’ve said this to Gov. Ritter,” Hickenlooper said of how the regulations were adopted.

“What happened was, the environmentalists went way overboard, I think, and pushed very hard — I shouldn’t say overboard, I’ll get myself in trouble — but they pushed very hard for certain things they thought were very important.

“The oil and gas people weren’t in the room. They felt betrayed, so they pushed back really hard . . . and all of a sudden the environmentalists felt they had been betrayed.”

Elise Jones, executive director of the Colorado Environmental Coalition, said she doesn’t know where Hickenlooper is coming from.

“The mayor didn’t actually sit through the 6,000 hours of public hearings, testimony and deliberations,” she said. “It was inclusive. We were outnumbered (by oil and gas industry representatives) in every meeting.”

Hickenlooper also said Ritter, a former Denver district attorney, has a prosecutorial background and is used to things getting solved in courtrooms. In the restaurant business, the mayor said, everybody comes together in the same room.

“In the end, maybe not everybody’s happy. Everybody’s a little ticked off, but everyone owns the compromise and is willing to work on it,” Hickenlooper said.

Said Dreyer: “Gov. Ritter stands by what was an extremely inclusive, comprehensive and public process.”

McInnis called the mayor’s comments “political posturing, plain and simple.”

“The mayor had plenty of time and opportunity when these job-killing regulations were being considered to pick up the phone, send an e-mail or simply walk across the street to the Capitol and make his views known,” McInnis said.

“He didn’t. Now that he’s running for governor, he says he has concerns,” McInnis said. “It’s a little late now that jobs have been lost, and families and communities are hurting.”

McInnis spokesman Sean Duffy said that while Hickenlooper said it was bad to raise prices in restaurants during a recession, the actions taken by the legislature did just that.

“It’s not clear he even knows yet what was in those tax increases,” he said.

Democrats Ed Perlmutter and Jared Polis have joined their Republican congressional colleagues in backing legislation that would allow the Bureau of Land Management to relocate it headquarters to the West, and possibly to Colorado.

Two conservative taxpayer advocacy groups filed suit Wednesday against new Denver campaign finance disclosure rules for issue advocacy committees that they say will violate the privacy rights of their donors.